The recent years have certainly witnessed more importance on customer experience than the prices or products.
Experience that ignites those powerful emotions will transform and shape buying trends and patterns e.g.
- 67% of customers will pay more for an inclusive experience
- When consumers have an emotional connection with brands, they tend to have 306% higher lifetime value and are more likely to recommend to others (71% vs. 45%)
- When the problem is service-related, customers are 4x more likely to turn to a competitor versus product or price.
The message is clear: Your brand will have to pay equal attention to becoming an “experience leader,” or you might lose your prospects to your competitors.
As the world accelerates towards becoming digital, the most significant part of customer experience will be delivered through online mediums and channels and thus making digital customer experience a prominent aspect.
However, going digital would also mean difficulty in interpreting customer reactions and sentiments. This will pose a new challenge for industries to overcome.
Whether you’re interacting with customers on the frontlines or fixing the bugs from behind the scenes, being more focussed on the technology, learning what works, and crafting that seamless digital customer experience is what you want to provide.
The clarity and authentic approach have to be the top-notch priority for every marketing team around the globe.
What is digital customer experience?
Digital customer experience refers to your brand’s online interaction with its audience or customers.
It can be through your company website, mobile apps, social media channels, chatbots, or any other virtual touchpoint.
The mode of communication can be any – what matters the most is the perception that your customers gain and take along.
Online customer experience will become one of the most prominent aspects to build brand identity and care for your customers on a long-term basis. Such emotional connection adds to that icing of the cake apart from your best services.
Overlooking the importance of operational aspects of the experience can be dangerous: From Shopping Cart experience to Contact Us forms, every little customer interaction adds up to building that overall “feeling” towards your brand.
Your conversations tell a story. What story would you want your customers to share with others?
What is a great digital customer experience?
Digital customer experience is the wholesome experience consumers have upon interacting with your brand via any of the communication channels.
That ‘great’ digital customer experience strives to provide faster, frictionless, responsive, and most importantly, more reliable experience for customers when they juggle between brand-choosing and settling in “clients” journey.
Brands that focus and provide great Digital Customer Experience offer a cohesive and harmonious online experience that attracts and retains their customers.
Emerging Technologies can Enhance Customer Digital Experience
Some studies revealed a surprising number of benefits from emerging technologies like improved speed, and smoothness of digital experiences.
Faster loading speeds and more efficient AI (Artificial Intelligence) implementation will give room for enhanced and streamlined user experience irrespective of any device.
Increasing interactivity doesn’t mean you should spam and over bother your audience as it might backfire.
Thus it’s important to ensure a healthy gap between interacting and spamming.
What Are Emerging Technologies?
Emerging Technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning (ML), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), are a few of the scalable infrastructures available, acting as significant factors driving a massive impact on Customer Experience. Let’s have a closer look.
Intelligent Objects
We are the generation with Intelligent Connected Objects surrounded.
These objects can interact through speech, touch, and gesture; in fact, they can adjust their performance based on temperature, humidity, light and more.
They are capable of notifying human beings while sensing any change and in some way, they trigger enticing digital experiences.
Intelligent thermostats, ones by Nest, Philip’s Smart lighting, and Smart appliances by Samsung are some of the few examples of these intelligent objects.
Intelligent Self
Human beings are moving forward to having “technology” becoming their extending selves.
Since already surrounded by so many devices like GPS tracking mobile apps, phone cameras, and microphones, people are constantly being monitored by brands who use the same data to enhance their services.
The data users normally track about themselves relating to health or finances are vigorously used by enterprises for providing more related experiences.
The examples of Levi for creating an interactive jacket capable of conveying every user gesture into an input. The camera-enabled contact lens was supported by Samsung.
Intelligent Places
Today, hotel guests can open their door rooms and adjust their AC temperature with a few clicks through mobile apps – these and many more examples show how technology made places more accessible, responsive, and personalized.
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technologies provided plenty of possibilities, where earlier such experience of being “virtually-present” was inaccessible to customers.
Digitization on places has left a tremendous mark in shaping the online customer experience. We can’t find a day so far when Intelligent Places will take part in managing almost every sort of business.
Emerging Technologies shaping Digital Experiences
Emerging technology has the capacity to create new digital experiences utterly different from what we have been witnessing so far.
Let’s take a look at a few of those principles:
Contextualizing Customer Experience
To be effective, your customers’ journey must be contextualized and personalized – for your buyers shopping preferences.
Brands need to convey the value gained from this understanding but also enable customers to control the use of their data. Understanding important moments from a customer perspective is very important and these listening posts should be set when the customer agrees.
The experience has to resonate and take into account the users’ context. For example, lights shouldn’t be automatically switched on just because somebody entered the room.
The situation of the buyer should be considered first for providing an excellent and practical customer experience.
Nudge the Customers to Make Positive Choices
With lives moving forward to more complexity, ‘nudging’ becomes important to invite your customers to react positively or consent to defaults pre-set by the brand policy.
Over a decade of behavioral economics research has shown that such nudges are effective in influencing consumer behaviors.
Technology has also been helping in making the right decision – well-designed product or service defaults benefit both company and consumer by simplifying decision making, enhancing customer satisfaction, reducing risk, and driving profitable purchases.
Understanding user context, needs, and emotional states are equally crucial for enterprises in such a situation.
Providing the best customer experience will require focussing on the user’s present emotional state also.
Appealing to User Senses
It is said that successful ads touch hearts and minds.
95% of our purchasing decisions are made subconsciously – the statistic from The Harvard Business Review shows clearly how our mind is ruled by emotion and justified with logic.
The brand’s job is to create users’ experience by stimulating their five senses. In other words, an effective approach allows customers to subconsciously smell, touch, hear or see your product or services as if they were actually using it.
Consider your target audience and the goals for each specific campaign, then select the senses that can drive the strongest results with your specific product or service and focus on those areas in your copy.
Brands also take part in designing the interfaces appealing to the user senses using tactile and natural interfaces (NUIs) that blend well with AR/VR technology.
No matter if you’re looking to tap into positive or negative feedback, emotional advertising is the optimal solution to engage your target audience.
Conclusion
With the emerging technologies still in the evolution phase, online customer digital experiences are subjected to constant transformation.
The calling is for product managers, associates, developers, and designers to keep pace with the constant change and adapt their processes to create valuable customer experience.